It’s a Man Thing

Our grandson, Evan Hiatt, turned 18 on Sunday, Father’s Day.  On Saturday we did a son, father and grandfather ride up a 7,976 foot high mountain in Evan’s car, a Toyota 4Runner.  It is a high-center vehicle with 4 wheel drive, equipped to go just about anywhere.  Why would anybody search to find the most difficult possible place to take a car up a steep trail to a mountain ridge?  It’s a “man thing”.  Men seek to conquer the earth… and we Fathers and sons happen to be men J.  “Challenge” is in our DNA.

They had chosen a road on the map… Well, not really a road… more like a trail between the trees, climbing over huge boulders, deep pits and crossing small creeks in the car as it tipped from side to side and crawled up to the top of the mountain ridge.  It took us more than an hour to go 2 miles. 

  

Tim had to hike in front of the car part of the time to find out how to get around massive unmovable boulders weighing tons… while Evan drove.  Sometimes he had to squeeze between trees with only a few inches on each side while the car was tipping from one side to the other.  I hiked ahead with Tim some of the time to shoot pictures.

Suddenly we came out of the forest into a huge area with few trees and covered with millions of green plants with bright yellow flowers… 

and peppered with little white poppies.  I took this picture of one and I thought I heard God’s voice up in the sky, “I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  Wherefore, if I so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall I not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” KJV  (When God speaks from the sky He uses the old fashioned King James Version that I grew up with. J)

Here there was lots of free air space… so we stopped to fly the incredible quadcopter that we had brought with us.  Quite like a helicopter, a quadcopter is a drone with four propellers and this one carries a good quality video camera attached.  Evan is expert at remote controlling this creature.  He takes it up to just a pin-point in the sky and then down to skim barely over the green plants.  All this time it was totally under his control and filming us below… wherever he chose to aim the camera.  Finally he landed it gently at his feet.  And to think that my dad, when a teenager, had to ride horseback to get to the next town!

Click here and wait a few seconds for it to load then watch this 2 ½ minute video taken from the quadcopter under Evan’s control. (To assure that the video runs smoothly, hit the play arrow to start and then hit pause and wait until the grey line shows that it is loaded and then hit play again.)

Coming down the mountain trail was much faster, mostly because Evan had been over the trail now and knew the best way to dodge the boulders and trees.  He is a skilled driver for a young-‘un.  We were just three kids, ages 18, 58 and 83.

Then we drove over to see Alpine Lake, stopped at Angel’s Camp for dinner and got home at 9:30 PM… all in one piece.  A great Happy Father’s Day gift from heaven!

Ralph